Naming is hard to do well, almost as hard as designing good software in the first place. Take for instance the term ‘node’ which depending on the context can mean A fundamental unit of the DOM (Document Object Model) used in creating rich HTML5 applications. A basic unit of the Semantic Web–a thing you can say stuff…
Category: web20
As the world of web apps gets more framework-y, I need to get up to speed on contemporary automation testing tools. One of the most popular ones right now is the open source Selenium project. From the look of it, that project is going through an awkward adolescent phase. For example: Selenium IDE lets you…
Another XForms site launched this week. This one seems pretty close to what I would like XForms Institute to become, if I had an extra 10 hours per week. -m
I enjoyed Nicole Sullivan‘s talk at the BayJax Meetup on Object-Oriented CSS, something I hadn’t run in to before. Adding predictability to CSS development seems like a huge win. I need to wrap my head around it better. Anyone with experience using this technique care to comment? -m
On May 8 I wrote: it’s time for the W3C to show some tough love and force the two (X)HTML Working Groups together. On July 2, the W3C wrote: Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed….
On the eRDF discussion posting, Toby Inkster, an implementer of eRDF, talks about why it’s bad to steal the id attribute, and why RDFa is better suited for general purpose metadata. Worth a read. -m
The W3C RDFa specification is now in Candidate Recommendation phase, with an explicit call for implementations (of which there are several). Momentum for RDFa is steadily building. What about eRDF, which favors the existing HTML syntax over new attributes? There’s still a place for a simpler syntactic approach to embedding RDF in HTML, as evidenced…
Actually, instead of a review, let me quote the opening testimonial from the inside-front cover. Competing globally with dynamic capabilities is the top priority of multinational executives and managers everywhere. Rethinking strategy in a highly networked world is the big challenge. How can your company navigate successfully in this turbulent, highly networked and socially connected…
So today Yahoo! announced a major facet of what I’ve been working on lately: making the web more meaningful. Lots of fantastic coverage, including TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb (and others, please link in the comments), and supportive responses and blog posts across the board. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this good about being a…
Admittedly, their marketing folks wouldn’t describe it that way, but essentially that’s what was announced today. (documentation in PDF format, closely related to what-used-to-be Konfabulator tech; here’s the interesting part in HTML) The press release talks about reaching “billions” of mobile consumers; even if you don’t put too much emphasis on press releases (you shouldn’t)…
It’s a common need to parse space-separated attribute values from XPath/XSLT 1.0, usually @class or @rel. One common (but incorrect) technique is simple equality test, as in {@class=”vcard”}. This is wrong, since the value can still match and still have other literal values, like “foo vcard” or “vcard foo” or ” foo vcard bar “….
In the last few weeks, I’ve been getting more recruitment pitches, including from the well known person ________ who is now at _______, for a think-tank position with _______, multiple LinkedIn requests from Web 2.0 company ________ and even ________. So, is this a sign that the general industry is picking up? -m P.S. I’m…
I started writing this post back when doing tech editing the “Rich Client Alternatives” chapter on Web 2.0, the book. Now, with Apollo getting some attention, it’s worth revisiting. What do XUL, Yahoo! Widgets, OpenLaszlo, Silverlight, and Apollo have in common? All of them mix content with presentation to some degree. Years of experience on…
ERH’s comments on XForms, as part of his predictions for 2007. Worth a read. -m
The nofollow setting on an outbound link should be a user-editable option, subject to the same community process that all other content on wikipedia already is. (Site guidelines, dispute resolution, restricted editing on certain articles for unregistered users, etc.) By default, links would get nofollow, but over time, they could be ‘blessed’, perhaps after a…
Link. My comment: “duh”. In fact, don’t even try to copy Web 1.0 on phones. Even the concept of what’s uable differs on the small screen. -m
Article (with a non-best-practice URL) from seomoz. If you’re into this kind of thing, Web 2.0 The Book has an entire chapter on it. Nitpick: Also note how normal folks say URL, not the even-more-geeky URI. -m
A must-read posting from Mark Birbeck, who knows a few things about XForms and Web Forms 2.0. He talks about the respective approaches embodied in XForms and Web Forms 2.0, and concludes that the primary difference between them has little to do with simplicity. He goes on to analyze differences in how developers and users…
Listed with a pub date of December 6, 2006. (Eric let me in on this link.) The tech editing is out the door, and things are moving along. -m
Still tech editing the final pieces of the Web 2.0 book. Such a huge part of what people mean when they talk about Web 2.0 is the ugly term “user-generated content”. As many have pointed out, all three words comprising that phrase are inaccurate or obtuse (or both). We need a better term. How about…
Word on the street is that some of the new stuff in XForms 1.1 is fantastic. Also on my to-carefully-read list, the mobileOK Scheme. As always, any thoughts welcome here. -m
Write up by Duncan Cragg. More and more momentum is building for this meme. -m
To me, the true power of the web is in mediating conversations between parties that have never met. I consider it a success when a new name posts a comment–and comments have been picking up here. -m
It’s no secret that Yahoo! has two different photo sites. And two different social bookmarking sites. Until pretty recently I thought this was craziness. But gradually I’ve realized the power of this approach. You take a smaller, hipper embodiment of an idea alongside a mainstream site. The resulting double-threat can’t easily be matched be either…
Part of tech reviewing means dusting off a Windows machine again. I haven’t done more than check email or run Quickbooks online on a Windows machine since I was writing my book in 2003. Remarkably, Windows XP is still the latest desktop OS available. But it needs updates. Checking my update history, I had 37…
Still in development, but I have clearance to blog about a forthcoming Web 2.0 book. So far I haven’t seen a good book that covers all the technical angles of Web 2.0, from designing URL spaces to Ajax to proper use of HTTP. I’m tech reviewing this book, so I have high expectations for it….